A Radio Studio At Three
The night show runs from midnight to four. The studio is in the back of the building on Kampala Road, past the sales office and the newsroom, through a door with a red light over it that nobody, in my eight years on this shift, has ever needed to check. The engineer on the other side of the glass for the first five hours is Patrick, who does the crossword. For the last hour it is Ivan, who eats plantain chips out of a plastic bag and who believes, sincerely, that one day a caller will declare her love for him on air, and who I do not have the heart to disappoint by pointing out that my show's audience is mostly men on night watch at petrol stations and in hotels.
The format of the show is simple. I play records. I take calls. I talk. The callers are, depending on the night, truck drivers on the Jinja road, security guards, nurses coming off shift, insomniacs, women whose children have gone to bed, men who cannot remember why they used to sleep. They call to request a song. They call to argue about a footballer. They call to tell me, once in a while, something that I do not know how to answer, and I try, on those calls, to say less rather than more, because in my experience the less you say on the radio at three in the morning the more a caller hears.
The first time Florence called was in the middle of October. She said her name was Florence and that she was in Najjanankumbi